The Berkeley City Council, after passing a resolution calling for the resettlement of detainees released from Guantanamo in the United States, voted against inviting such persons to live in their fair city, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Earlier, an organization called “Move America Forward, proposed in a statement that Berkeley City Council members ‘go live in GITMO where they can hang out with hundreds of terrorists.’ The group said it would pay for their air fare.”

Meanwhile, Nir Rosen, who scoffed at Lara Logan’s assault in Tahrir Square, was fired from his position as fellow at the NYU’s Center on Law and Security. Jim Geraghty at the National Review says he never thought to see the day, but is glad the Center on Law and Security did it anyway.

From Karen J. Greenberg, Executive Director, Center on Law and Security

Nir Rosen is always provocative, but he crossed the line yesterday with his comments about Lara Logan. I am deeply distressed by what he wrote about Ms. Logan and strongly denounce his comments. They were cruel and insensitive and completely unacceptable. Mr. Rosen tells me that he misunderstood the severity of the attack on her in Cairo. He has apologized, withdrawn his remarks, and submitted his resignation as a fellow, which I have accepted. However, this in no way compensates for the harm his comments have inflicted. We are all horrified by what happened to Ms. Logan, and our thoughts are with her during this difficult time.

Why the outbreak of reason? A succession of recent events, from the financial crisis to the wave of unrest sweeping the Middle East, has created a new sense of mortality in everyone. Dick Morris, in an article titled “The Damage Obama Has Done,” presents a table, which while not entirely the best source for identifying the various factors which went into causing the change, nevertheless gets the point across: reality hurts. For all its shortcomings, Morris’ table best explains our new psychological world.

Things look different to frightened, 60 something year old people facing an uncertain future than to 18 year olds at Yasgur’s farm on their way to Paradise.The idea of actual terrorists living down the block from the drugstore and the idea that a newspaperwoman can be raped like an animal being eaten alive by wolves terrify them.

CBS sent Lara and her crew there to cover the “jubilation”. Speaking of Yasgur’s farm how conceited is the Berkley Council to assume that the detainees would want to relo from GITMO to a place that reeks of hippy chicks?
Dennis Miller has been to GITMO he describes his view of the conditions there:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAnkj9aL4O4

Anyone with assets, and hopes of the assets generating a return in some way, now realizes that the only way to get a return is by entering into the banksters’ casino. Free Fed money to the banksters allows them (surely in collaboration with the Fed and Treasury) to generate increasing share value in the stock market. Printing of money results in inflation affecting commodities, creating a bubble that is generating big returns for investors and guaranteed diminishment of static resources, such as savings accounts. If you are desperate for a return on investment, you are going to have to choose one of the bubbles. And if QE ever slows down, the whole edifice collapses.

401k Hotel California.

Chicago B’rack has shown Wall Street how to really do the game right. Bernie Madoff can only gape in astonishment at how the pros do it.

a/3 is right –the same banksters who worked with Enron and the UN criminals such as Maurice Strong to set up the carbon credit exchange in Chicago –the very exchange that recently preceded the NYSE to a new home in Germany –are Obama’s banking advisors. They know what they’re doing alright. I’m sure they even have the ‘blow-off’ planned. Yes, ya gotta get in the market –but you must be light on your feet and ready to move out, too.

Who regularly uses rape as a weapon? To what ends? Where (and what) are the statistics and studies? Last serious writing I recall detailed the Serb gangs and their military atrocities in Bosnia. There are the occasional newspaper reports of trouble in various ethic areas where a woman’s appearance has been the excuse.

There is likely some first person reporting of the attack. Who were these people? What were they shouting? How were they reacting to the rest of the crowd? If they were pro-regime, had they left a trail of beaten protestors in their wake? Or would a little sunshine spoil the msm meme-of-the-day?

Regarding wretchard’s chart, I will note that Jan 2009 as a reference point was near the bottom of the crash but some of the numbers reported probably trailed events, Jan 2008 or even Jan 2007 would be better reference points.

Just remember, we are still walking the razor’s edge on hyperinflation or some more novel forms of financial apocalypse – and probably will continue to do so IF WE ARE VERY LUCKY for many years.

……For politicians, printing money is desirable for two reasons. Firstly, it acts as an unseen tax. One which few voters understand and for which even fewer are likely to blame the political class, at least in the beginning. Secondly, by reducing the value of the currency, the measuring stick I mentioned above, politicians are able to fool many of the voters that their wealth has increased, but of course no such thing has happened.

For members of the privileged banking class the appeal of printing money is that they are best positioned to take advantage of the confusion between the measurement of the pool of capital and the actual pool of capital itself. In simple terms, they can exchange the declining currency for productive assets while artificially low interest rates finance these activities at minimal cost.”

I think the Obama Democrats and their media minions have given us government by boondoggle. So we got the health care boondoggle, the alternative energy boondoggle, the bankrupt the coal-oil-gas industry boondoggle, the electcric car kickback boondoggle, the High speed rail boondoggle and the “let every kid borrow a hundred thousand dollars to study anthropology and then not pay it back” boondoggle. I know, I left a lot out.

And then, of course, we got the “pretending it will all work” boondoggle. And then when it don’t work we’ll have the double down on all these boondoggles boondoggle, because all these boondoggles — pardon me, investments — require more “resources.”

Berkely, California City Council. They have my vote for the stupidest morons in America. Except that big desk they sit behind is more like the boat in “A Man Without A Country”. They can see America but they never quite touch it.

I’m surprised they don’t have Swiss Guards.

Nir Rosen must’ve been drunk when he wrote that nonsense although he’s sure sober now. Don’t expect he’ll be hired by any women anytime soon.

The Iranian people are rioting, again. The Iranian government is sending two warships through the Suez Canal. In these are likely supplies for Gaza. The ship’s cargo may be weapons, but if the Iranians are smart the cargo will be food or humanitarian supplies. The ships are designed to provoke Israel to attack. Because these are warships, a commando raid without significant loss of life is not possible. Perhaps the Iranians want to distract their own population with foreign adventures. Whatever the ship’s cargo, or the Iranian motives,Israel will have to damage or sink the ships. This will not turn out well.

Respectfully disagree. We’re all Jews now, only most of us haven’t figured that out yet. Poor Lara shows us what our fate is intended to be and what it will be until we reclaim the moral stature we squandered when we became an Obamanation.

Wake me when her tragedy is related — by someone somewhere — to the stature and treatment of women under Islam.

Rape is sometimes a genocidal act, as when thousands of women are raped by soldiers from a different tribe in order to make them unclean for their own men and to increase mixed births that are rejected by both sides. See especially what happened between Hutu, Tutsi and various eastern Congo tribes over the past two decades. This presumably has nothing to do with what happened in Egypt, but evil demons — and mixed motives — drive men to these vicious acts. F

“The Berkeley City Council, after passing a resolution calling for the resettlement of detainees released from Guantanamo in the United States, voted against inviting such persons to live in their fair city…”

Some of us have elected cowards as leaders – cowards lead to the rear. Cowards are not progressive – cowards are regressive. Cowards want and often force others to do the dirty work required for their easy life. George Orwell pinned these cowardly pacifists to the wall.

“PACIFIST: Those who “abjure” violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf… The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis… All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.” George Orwell

I would like to see a chart of how costs went up in Egypt and Tunisia, since those economic policies (of obama)and QE2 devalued the american dollar and forced crude and food and commodity prices up.

that chart shows what happened in the USA and to some extent there is still capacity and social programs to ease the burden ..in third world countries those price increases are a body blow ..and very personal to their survival.

Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed commented on QE2 and noted: “U.S. nonfarm payrolls fell by 8.75 million jobs from their peak in January 2008 to their trough in February 2010. Estimates are that the population of Americans of working age increased by 4.4 million during the same period, creating a shortfall of over 13 million jobs. Since February 2010, the shortfall has only gotten worse: Although employers have added approximately 1 million new jobs, the working-age population has increased by an additional 1.7 million. All in all, we have approximately 6 million more people of working age than we did when the recession began—and a net loss of 7.7 million jobs. Divining policies that will encourage the private sector to increase hiring by enough to make up some of this lost ground is both an urgent and a daunting task.”

Our media has overlooked the obvious. Egypt stopped functioning. There are no pay checks. The tourists have gone. (And, the last 5,000 or so were beset by mob violence.) The mask that Egyptians were friendly has been pulled off. Other than tribal warfare. One person going after what another person has, is what’s ruling the day!

Lara wasn’t the only victim! There was an attempt to do this to Anderson Cooper and Katie Couric. Their security was better. How the anchor just disappeared is a story worth hearing. But C-BS won’t tell.

Nor are we being told of what happened to an entire society in break down! If you want the truth you’re going to have to figure this out for yourself. While I don’t see the American military keeping its position in Egypt. I’m willing to bet that the generals opt for the Chinese. And, LAW AND ORDER is going to have to arrive, first.

This won’t be solved with elections. How far reaching is the incompetence? On the level of Neville Chamberlain.

#8 Ari Tai & #20 rhhaidin,
Don’t beleive those who try to assign some political cause to rape. Female psychologists write books alleging that it is a crime with complex explainations and such. It’s all bunk. Those animals were simply acting on their worst impulses…with no civil society to restrain them, and no moral code to counter their animal lust. Islam assigns virtue to such acts: infidel Kafir whores deserve to get raped. But invoking Allah comes after. First comes the impulse. Animals force sex on unwanted partners. We know better than to explain that with complex explanations. The Egyptians in that square that day are dogs. Islam rewards them.
It is my contention that Islam draws many converts in America who seek a club where its members get to treat women like dogs.

Part of me was really hoping that the Berkeley City Council would vote to accept Gitmo detainees. Given that some people there really do want to invite nasty murderers and rapists into their town (so long as they are from al-Qaeda), this is an opportunity.

If they had gone forward with their plan to invite al-Qaeda into town, various states throughout the United States should have released criminals from their prisons and put them on conditional probation – they would be given a one-way ticket to Berkeley and agree to never come back to the state that freed them.

Would this flood Berkeley with hardened criminals? Of course, but isn’t that what many of the leftists of Berkeley want in the first place? Or is it that they only want politically correct murderers rather than garden-variety murderers out of Texas prisons?

Attention. This is an important insight! People are programmed by our DNA to worry, to look for problems, like what do we do if the fish don’t appear this year/ and where do we hide if those guys from the next valley attack us??? Our ancestors who worried, and foretold evil tidings, were the ones who survived, and had children, etc etc, and here we are.

However. Today, in North America and Europe, we are comfortable, and the only problem on the horizon is maybe a lot of snow this winter.

This is the only explanation I see for the sheer silliness revealed by the environmentalists and all the other people who are running around, (very well fed, well clothed, in warm well built houses with great plumbing, never having seen a case of diptheria or smallpox)… demanding that we change our ways and hug the nearest tree. Honestly.

It occured to me that what happened to Lara Logan is a microcosm of what’s dysfunctional about the left, or maybe about our general class of elites. There’s the way they think the world should be, and then there’s the way it really is. If the two don’t line up, they just ignore it and go on as if their wishes were true.

The world ought to be a place where a woman can go about without fear of being assaulted or raped. And in some parts of the world, that’s true. But it’s not true in the middle of a riot in a country that doesn’t give women a whole lot of respect to begin with, has just finished burning down the police stations, and is PO’d at westerners to boot. Logan just wished away reality to go out there and be an edgey, on-the-scene journalist.

And the Berzerklyites wished away reality in their opposition to Gitmo. The world ought to be a place where we don’t face the unpleasant choice between sacrificing some of our principles or sacrificing some of our families. But that’s not the world we live in, and they expect someone else to deal with the consequences of their failed wishes.

Krugman wishes we lived in a world where Keynes was right and the best way to get out of debt was to go farther, and faster, into it (not having an Ivy League education and being a simple programmer instead of an economist, I’m unclear on exactly how it’s supposed to work, but I assume it’s something to do with blowing past MAX_INT on the debt processor and having the overflow effor flip the sign of the number so we are suddenly trillions in the black). But reality is that Keynesian policies have brought nothing by misery and ruin wherever they’ve been tried, and Krugman just waves it all way and pretends it isn’t so.

Oh, I don’t know. The Cultists on the Left will continue their brainwashed way right into hell itself.

A friend, who was molested as a child, sent me an email about Lara Logan’s gang rape. When I responded that I wasn’t surprised, adding some stats about the sky-high rate of sexual assault in Egypt, she accused me of being — Yes! — bigoted for mentioning it, and “determined to make Islam look as bad as possible.”

Erm. Doesn’t look like they need any help from me, really.

She also said, “It’s just as bad here in the United States.” OH for crying out loud. THAT again. Have any of these idiots ever traveled abroad? read anything about any foreign nation? I sent back a link to a video by Memri on female genital mutilation (over 90%) in Egypt as rebuttal.

She was, of course, furious that I called attention to the uncomfortable facts that none of them is willing to face. This type of denial is, in my experience, absolutely adamantine and in nearly every case, unbreakable. I have more peace of mind if I regard them as mental patients.

“Meanwhile, Nir Rosen, who scoffed at Lara Logan’s assault in Tahrir Square, was fired from his position as fellow at the NYU’s Center on Law and Security”

Why? Is someone enforcing moral turpitude clauses now? Too late, by half, I’d say; otherwise let university faculties tremble with fear. What happened to Voltaire’s dictum? These words not worthing defending? What in his words mean he can’t do his job, or is anyone with whom we disagree about sexuality eligible to be fired these days?

Hang in there leftists, it’s going to get a whole lot more interesting. I wonder how much longer these hate filled lunatics will dare call themselves “progressives”? In any case, the last sub-group of the deranged & the people who have caused the most damage to normality in America, our media, will be the last to catch on. After all, they know better.

What a hoot! Berkeley once again confirms that the famous solicitude of the left toward “the oppressed” is all a sham. According to most of the Bay area intelligentsia the Gitmo detainees are “freedom fighters” and “Minutemen” struggling against an unjust imperialist power. Who could possibly object to having a few of them as neighbors? Their political views may be a little robust but who in Berkeley doesn’t feel strongly about something. Well perhaps the Berkeley City Council didn’t want anyone around showing them up by being even more anti-American than they are.

Also kudos to Storm-Rider at #25 above for drawing our attention to Orwell’s great observation on the nature of pacifists……”All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.”…..This is true for most of today’s “progressive” intellectuals. They are either at your throat or at your feet.

If this administration had any guts left the animals who did this to her would begin to disapear in the night. No renditions. No trials. No bodies. Just gone. If she were Russian or Israeli that would be happening already.

The American left does not admit to differences between what is personal and what is not. They cannot avoid it, yet they see themselves and messengers of universal truth. So Berekely council slinks off in shame rather than confront the awkward situation they created with their empty bobble-head resolution. As mom always said “its all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out”.

Contrast that with Israeli society where everything is personal. One thousand terrorist prisoners for the bodies of three of her own dead soldiers. That is personal. That has weight. To the Obamans and other progressive self-loathers to defend your own is shameful.

tehag 40: “is anyone with whom we disagree about sexuality eligible to be fired these days?”

No, no, not at all; no one should be fired for any public statement about human sexuality; because, hey, there is no such thing as wrong sexuality – right? Hell, if someone mocks a child or a girl who has been raped, or advocates rape or sex with children; then say not a thing – no one needs to be held responsible for sexual belief – just move along – because we cannot disagree with – with evil – that might hurt the Devil’s feelings. All people are the same (even the lazy compared to the hard-working); all cultures are the same (including those ruled by a Declaration & Constitution vs. those ruled by the Communist Manifesto); and all sex is the same. It’s really all the same – right?

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.” Karl Marx

“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending upon circumstances and the political situation, any act… could be good or could be bad.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

What in Lenin’s, Stalin’s or Hitler’s words meant they couldnt’ do their jobs?

There is nothing in Nir Rosen’s words which means he is stupid or that he can’t do his job. There is something in his words which means he is immoral, and therefore worthy to be fired, mocked and pubically humiliated.

“The Devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” Thomas More

truly –it’s one thing to pose as a better person than you are –that’s after all how one might progress as a person. But to pose as a tough SOB demanding that your neighbors redefine the politics of crime –then running like a rabbit when they take you up on it, well, i think that’s what the word ‘humiliation’ was invented for.

#37, Beverly – You might have asked your friend how many were raped at those violent, racist, Nazi teabagger rallies in the US. Should have been a lot, right? Maybe a sympathetic media covered them up, since they were all in the Tea Party pocket.

And if she comes back with that tired old faux statistic “Only 20% of rapes are ever reported,” you could ask, if they are never reported, then how can anyone calculate the number?

Don’t be surprised that the same mindset that can find no motivation in pro-Jihadi MAJ Hasan’s murder spree, during which he shouted “Allahu akhbar!” can only blame generic evil masculinity for a gang rape within a culture that practices female genital mutilation and stones women to death for being raped. Because we men are all the same the world over, you know.